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Thursday, December 31, 2015

`You Double Your Existence'

Much is
lost with our knowingness and deft deployment of irony. We become actors. We
play to an audience, real or imagined, external or otherwise. We don’t merely
enjoy a meal, a sonnet or a beautiful woman. We study ourselves in the act of
enjoyment, looking for ways to improve our form. We fear an unsophisticated
reaction to the world and its bounty. The Scottish essayist Alexander Smith was
no rube, but he knew how to enjoy life:

“The
intensest scarlet on an artist’s palette is but ochre to that I saw this
morning at sunrise. No, no, let me enjoy Mr. Tennyson’s verse, and the
blackbird’s song, and the colours of sunrise, but do not let me emulate them. I
am happier as it is. I do not need to make history,—there are plenty of people
willing to save me trouble on that score. The cook makes the dinner, the guest
eats it; and the last, not without reason, is considered the happier man.”

This skirts
Romantic rakishness, yet another performance, but reading Smith’s essays (Quotidiana
has a good selection) with some regularity suggests a pre-Modernist modesty. We
admire a man who understands the pleasures of Tennyson, birdsong and dawn. This
passage too is from “Books and Gardens”: “In my garden I spend my days; in my
library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my
books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. I
go into my library, and all history unrolls before me.”

For further
confirmation of Smith’s naturalness and literary sophistication, read this from
“A Shelf in My Bookcase” on the virtues of Boswell’s Life of Johnson: “It is quite impossible to over-state its worth.
You lift it, and immediately the intervening years disappear, and you are in
the presence of the Doctor. You are made free of the last century, as you are
free of the present. You double your existence.”

Smith was
born on this date, Dec. 31, in 1830, and died in 1867 at age thirty-seven. He
defines the charms of the too-often-patronized “minor writer.”

2 comments:

Amen to what Levi Stahl wrote! Any book entitled Books and Gardens becomes an immediate target for my library visit. The introduction of obscure-or-unknown-to-me authors is one of the joys of reading your blog. If one of the virtues of good writing is to spur a reader to action - even to action to find another good writer - you fit the bill. (My unverified reservations about what I presume to be some of your political views notwithstanding. No one's perfect. Please keep writing, should you ever decide to stop voting!